Frustrated by a lack of informed and honest review websites covering a wide range of electronic music, I write them myself.

Monday, April 24, 2017

The Green Kingdom - Harbor

Dronarivm: 2016

I feel like I’ve seen Michael Cottone’s project somewhere before, but my memory fails me. It could simply be a case of mistakenly misplacing The Green Kingdom for any other number of ambient aliases or titles over the years, this combination of words evoking similar imagery for any open field or deep forest. Or perhaps it’s an association with the more shoegazey side of mellow indie rock. For sure the sound you find on Harbor contains some of those markers, what with mellow, gentle acoustic guitars riding along calm, floaty pad work, but this is still firmly in the ambient-Proper camps.

Scoping out what Lord Discogs has to say, I’m left blank as well. Mr. Cottone’s been releasing music as The Green Kingdom for over a decade now, but he’s as much a label journeyman as you’ll ever find - almost every release of his came out on a different, obscure print (Heldernacht, SEM Lable, Own Records, The Land Of, Nomadic Kids Republic (!), Tench). If anything, he seems to have finally settled down with Dronarivm, this and his previous album Expanses both coming out on the Russian ambient-drone home. He also provided a podcast mix for the blog A Strangely Isolated Place, thus rubbing shoulders with the likes of Ulrich Schnauss, Carbon Based Lifeforms, ASC, Bvdub, Martin Nonstatic, and a slew of other names I don’t recognize (so… many… ambient…).

Still, even this wasn’t enough to spike my memory, so I went to Last.fm to see if there was any additional info The Lord That Knows All may have missed. And holy cow, what is up with this Expanses 2 track? It’s gotten tons of plays, the rest of his music only modest scrobbles. Is it the same with Spotify streams? You bet, the track garnering over three-hundred fifty thousand plays – the next closest, from the same album, barely squeaks over the twenty-thousand mark. Dear Lord, why has that one track gotten so much atten- oh, it was in the Hotline Miami 2 soundtrack. Yep, that’ll do it for ya’. Can’t say that’s why The Green Kingdom looks familiar to me, but interesting finding this out nonetheless.

So, Harbor. The concept is simple enough, Mr. Cottone looking to guide the listener along the soothing waves of seaside shores. Surprisingly, there’s little use of wave samples, Green Kingdom instead letting the rolling drone mimic the feeling of chilling on a beach. Some tracks offer a chipper, mellow vibe with guitars leading, almost like an overdubbed version of Kruangbin (Harbor, Jade Star). Other tracks skew closer to dub techno, though with plenty of warm pads keeping the cold sterility away (Haze Layers, Morrowloops). Mostly though, we get calm, dubby pad drones with heavily treated orchestral and acoustic instruments. It all rather sounds like… wait, the opening part of Evergreen Sunset… that really sounds like… Vangelis? Creation Du Monde? Yeah, it totally does! Oh man, forget the next Miami Hotline game, get The Green Kingdom to score the next iteration of Cosmos.